pipecat-ai/smart-turn-v2

Smart Turn v2

Smart Turn v2 is an open‑source semantic Voice Activity Detection (VAD) model that tells you whether a speaker has finished their turn by analysing the raw waveform, not the transcript.
Compared with v1 it is:

• Multilingual – 14 languages (EN, FR, DE, ES, PT, ZH, JA, HI, IT, KO, NL, PL, RU, TR).
• 6 × smaller – ≈ 360 MB vs. 2.3 GB.
• 3 × faster – ≈ 12 ms to analyse 8 s of audio on an NVIDIA L40S.

Links

• Blog post: Smart Turn v2
• GitHub repo with training and inference code

Intended use & task

Use‑case	Why this model helps
Voice agents / chatbots	Wait to reply until the user has actually finished speaking.
Real‑time transcription + TTS	Avoid “double‑talk” by triggering TTS only when the user turn ends.
Call‑centre assist & analytics	Accurate segmentation for diarisation and sentiment pipelines.
Any project needing semantic VAD	Detects incomplete thoughts, filler words (“um …”, “えーと …”) and intonation cues ignored by classic energy‑based VAD.

The model outputs a single probability; values ≥ 0.5 indicate the speaker has completed their utterance.

Model architecture

• Backbone : wav2vec2 encoder
• Head     : shallow linear classifier
• Params   : 94.8 M (float32)
• Checkpoint: 360 MB Safetensors (compressed)
  The wav2vec2 + linear configuration out‑performed LSTM and deeper transformer variants during ablation studies.

Training data

Source	Type	Languages
human_5_all	Human‑recorded	EN
human_convcollector_1	Human‑recorded	EN
rime_2	Synthetic (Rime)	EN
orpheus_midfiller_1	Synthetic (Orpheus)	EN
orpheus_grammar_1	Synthetic (Orpheus)	EN
orpheus_endfiller_1	Synthetic (Orpheus)	EN
chirp3_1	Synthetic (Google Chirp3 TTS)	14 langs

• Sentences were cleaned with Gemini 2.5 Flash to remove ungrammatical, controversial or written‑only text.
• Filler‑word lists per language (e.g., “um”, “えーと”) built with Claude & GPT‑o3 and injected near sentence ends to teach the model about interrupted speech.

All audio/text pairs are released on the pipecat‑ai/datasets hub.

Evaluation & performance

Accuracy on unseen synthetic test set (50 % complete / 50 % incomplete)

Lang	Acc %	Lang	Acc %
EN	94.3	IT	94.4
FR	95.5	KO	95.5
ES	92.1	PT	95.5
DE	95.8	TR	96.8
NL	96.7	PL	94.6
RU	93.0	HI	91.2
ZH	87.2	–	–

Human English benchmark (human_5_all) : 99 % accuracy.

Inference latency for 8 s audio

Device	Time
NVIDIA L40S	12 ms
NVIDIA A100	19 ms
NVIDIA T4 (AWS g4dn.xlarge)	75 ms
16‑core x86_64 CPU (Modal)	410 ms

oai_citation:7‡Daily

How to use

Please see the blog post and GitHub repo for more information on using the model, either standalone or with Pipecat.